scribbler at large

Hello friends! As of sometime last month, we have been living in Beijing for a year. I don't think any other 365 days of my life have passed this quickly, and HOLY HELL is how I feel about it. But let me scratch the golf-ball-sized mosquito bite on my ankle (while sweating into my most summer-friendly outfit) and try harder with words.

First: for me this milestone highlights the many Beijing places I haven't gone and Chinese things I have not done. Before this, I could say to myself, chill out, self, you’re a new resident here. But “new” can’t be applied to me anymore, and now I’m harassed by the semi-desperate question of, what I am doing with my time? The only way to cure the self-loathing that follows is to put on a fanny pack and GET OUT THERE to explore. Which I have put off in recent weeks due to extreme heat. My fear of missing out = exacerbated.

Part of this “year-later” panic stems from living in a pocket of the western-world where I can enjoy all the charming things about life in China while taking refuge in places where English is spoken and western customs flourish. In lazy times, I hang out in the pocket, and the year-mark turned out to be a personal spotlight on how much time I've spent doing that. Eep.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the language barrier is another big part of the living-on-the-outskirts feeling—when you need two minutes of planning to say a single sentence out loud, its hard to make Chinese friends. Without Chinese friends it's difficult to climb out of the western bubble and, you know, insert oneself into the local scene. Every day is a reckoning with how much Mandarin I still don’t understand. Sometimes, though, the reckoning happens in conjunction with euphoria over how much I can understand. If that sounds insane, that’s because it is. At night my husband and I still share highlights of the Chinese conversations we’ve had throughout the day (cut to us clinking beers over effective use of the passive tense), and I still feel like Tom Hanks starting a fire in Castaway when a cab driver understands my instructions. But success never goes to my head—days like today, when my Chinese teacher complimented the color of my toenails and I didn’t understand her, keep me in check.

To play my tiny violin for a moment, Chinese is tough. Just imagine, for a second, that one word means either "book" OR "tree," depending on whether you sustain your voice or let it drop as you speak the word. Now stop imagining, because it’s real, people. And there are more than just two “tones” to complicate things. On top of that, have you seen Chinese characters? There is no alphabet to learn—there are instead thousands of intricate characters to memorize. Best of all, some characters have two different pronunciations and multiple meanings, depending on the context you use them in.

All that said, I sometimes feel normal—dare I say comfortable?—these days, especially when I’m listening to someone else speak Chinese. At this point I'm better at following a story without getting sidetracked by a single mysterious vocab word, and my brain has learned to hop from familiar word to familiar word in quest of the gist.

Also, Chinese is super cool. Wild and/or vast concepts exist within the wording of simple phrases—like 望子成龙 (wang-zuh-chung-long) which literally translates to “hope one’s son becomes a dragon” and means “to have great hopes for one’s offspring.” The female version of this phrase involves a phoenix. In a different vein, I just learned the phrase 蛛丝马迹 (joo-suh-ma-jee) from an episode of a Chinese romantic comedy. It literally translates to “spider thread, horse track” but its actual meaning is “clue” or “trace.” There’s also the old classic 马马虎虎 (ma-ma-hoo-hoo) which translates to “horse horse tiger tiger” and in conversation means “so-so” or “not too bad" (which is, I'm sure, exactly what you expected it to mean). My personal favorite is 小心 (shyao-shin) which translates literally to “small heart,” and means "careful." How great is that? One more thing: there’s no conjugation in Chinese, and that’s a gift, my friends.

Vista interjection: standing on the Great Wall at Mutianyu.

My one-year panic and language-struggles aside, I look back at this year with fondness. There are things I haven’t yet blogged enough about—like the hutong and old folks dancing in the park and THE FOOD THE FOOD THE FOOD—that I will find forever awesome. On that last point, living here has underscored my own infatuation with eating, and I think I now get why Chinese people say eating in the US is a real hardship. The point is that my life in Beijing is interesting and good—it turns out that a city of 21 million people can keep a person entertained for at least a year...

Mint leaves wrapped in beef, topped with delicious pepper mixture.

To be frank, never as a child did I say to myself: I want to go to China. Or really anywhere outside the US, for that matter. But now that I’ve lived here for a while, I’m changed. (Yeah, I'm aware that I sound like the kid who went to Australia in ninth grade and came back with a faux Australian accent/lectures about the importance of living abroad.) People say, when you're about to move to China (for example), that living abroad is the best way to understand where you come from, and it's true, cliche or no. The year has been a slow back and forth between extreme appreciation for the old USA and gratitude for the stuff I love here. The upshot is that I may be developing an addiction for this kind of perspective, and the idea of not living abroad—or at least traveling internationally—in the future, sounds bu hao (not good) to me now.

Luckily, I'm a diplo-wife.

That's all for now, but I'll have more soon (this time I mean it). One more thing: